The Japanese writing system is composed of a combination of 3 different forms of writing, namely Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. In this course we'll briefly describe the overall writing system before diving into a series of lessons designed to teach you how to read and write Hiragana, arguably the most useful of the three for starting Japanese learners.

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There are no prerequisites for this course.

Hiragana can largely be broken down into sets of 5 syllables composed of the vowels a,i,u,e,o combined with a consonant sound.

We`ll cover one set per lesson, with a number of example Japanese sentences to show how they can be used.

For each lesson I suggest the following steps.

Step 1: watch the video and take notes

Step 2: try to write the characters from that lesson, along with any characters from previous lessons, on your own from memory

Step 3: check your work and review any characters you were unable to write correctly.

Step 4: move on to the next lesson and repeat steps